The American Way of Death Revisited - Jessica Mitford [101]
The mills of the FTC grind slowly, yet (in terms of results) exceedingly small. To those involved, the process seemed interminable—from 1973, when Arthur Angel and colleagues had begun researching the funeral industry, to announcement of the proposed trade rule in 1975, on through the public hearings to final adoption of the rule in 1984.
By 1985 it would seem that all was now in place for at least some minimal protection for the funeral buyer as provided in the rule.
However, that year I had a letter from a Mr. H., a seventy-six-year-old resident of Palo Alto, California, who was thinking about his funeral. Wishing to spare his daughter the job of arranging it, he telephoned a funeral home and asked their price for a simple cremation. About $300, said the funeral home. Mr. H.’s next step was to ask the funeral home for a written quotation. When it eventually arrived, the listed price came to $525.
Mr. H. knew all about the FTC “Funeral Rule”; he had made quite a study of it. So he wrote a letter of complaint to the San Francisco regional office. He sent me a copy of his letter together with the reply from an FTC staff member:
We have only limited resources to take formal actions against possible violators. Our actions are designed to correct those violations which affect a significant number of consumers.
That seemed to me ridiculous, for is not Mr. H. a member of the general public? And was not the funeral home’s misrepresentation exactly what the FTC rule was supposed to prevent?
My conversation with a lawyer in the same regional office, with whom I discussed this correspondence, was not reassuring. “We don’t represent individuals. This is an isolated case,” he told me. What, I asked, is considered to be “a significant number of consumers”? There is no set number, he answered. Would it be three? Six? A hundred? “I couldn’t say,” he said.
Frustrated, I telephoned FTC commissioner Patricia Bailey in Washington. She immediately saw the point; after that, things happened quickly. The director of the regional office, informed of the facts of this matter by Commissioner Bailey, promptly investigated and determined that Mr. H.’s case was “completely mishandled.” He assured me that the staff member who wrote the letter and the lawyer with whom I spoke had been “appropriately admonished.”
At the time, I thought this incident did raise some troubling questions: How many potential funeral shoppers would have the gumption of Mr. H., the tenacity to make a complaint to a government agency, and to a writer whom he had never met? Should one have to go to the expense of a phone call to Washington, D.C., to resolve the difficulty? But at least, thanks to the intervention of Commissioner Bailey, there was every reason to believe that the FTC staff members would never again treat a correspondent with a legitimate complaint in this patronizing and dismissive manner. Not so, as it turned out.
I remember once asking an editor at Life magazine what happens when the subject of an article complains that he or she has been misquoted, maligned, or otherwise unfairly treated by the mag. “Well, the first thing we do is to fire Murphy, and this usually satisfies the aggrieved party,” he explained. Murphy, of course, doesn’t exist except for the purpose of getting fired to placate an irate reader.
Ten years after our efforts on behalf of Mr. H., I discovered that Commissioner Bailey and I had been victims of a similar stratagem: evidently the alleged “appropriate admonishment” of some imaginary staff member was a convenient fiction adopted to shut us up.
In February 1995 I sought out Gerald Wright, the attorney responsible for enforcing the Funeral Rule in the San Francisco regional office of the FTC. What would happen today, I asked him, if an individual wrote to his office with a complaint like that of my long-ago Palo Alto correspondent?